STUDENT PITFALLS

WHEN WRITING RESEARCH PAPERS

1. Writing research papers is not perceived to be fun. Learning and research can be fun. PaperToolsPro™ can make the job more engaging for today’s students who are more comfortable with a keyboard than with a pen since they use email, chat rooms, instant messaging and the Internet with ease and frequency.

2. Writing note cards is tedious. Even with developed fine motor skills, writing 3 x 5 note cards by hand is tiring and unrewarding. Easily distracted when fatigued, students become disengaged from their reading; and note taking becomes cursory and mechanical. Thus, when students fall back on scanning text for only a main idea and copying words, they fail to benefit from processing the information—analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating it. PaperToolsPro™ forces students to practice these cognitive skills for research assignments of any length. Rather than writing note cards by hand and eventually typing that questionable information into a draft, students use PaperToolsPro™ to create their notes in their own words and efficiently transfer them into an outline or rough draft. Because they interact with the information and understand it, they can explain it in their own words to the audience of their research project. They become engaged, not detached from their learning.

3. Writing research papers requires organizational skills students often lack or do not apply to research assignments. Even if the assignment is broken down into the steps of the process and even if students have a teacher or aide help them, they may not be able to follow through when working independently. PaperToolsPro™ provides this structure every time the cursor blinks at the student while engaged in any stage of this process. PaperToolsPro™ imposes the structure all students need for any research so that they can do research projects within a wide range of complexity from a one-page report on spiders to a master’s thesis.

4. The value of documenting the source of information does not make sense to students. If information is free and accessible, it must be fair game to take as one’s own. We can teach students otherwise, but their perceived reality may not always change this behavior. PaperToolsPro™ reminds them to document the source and specific page just as the dinging sound in our cars reminds us to put on my seat belt even when we don’t want to be bothered.

5. Students often think they put information in their own words, but they don’t. “In my own words” to students means deleting a word or swapping a word or two in a passage with one readily in their vocabulary or from a thesaurus. Even gifted students are shocked and embarrassed when they are shown the similarity between an original passage and the nearly identical wording in their papers. Many students sincerely try to rephrase a passage, but do not succeed because they may not understand the material and need to think about it more, use a variety of reading strategies they learned, or relate it to what they already know. PaperToolsPro™ provides the means to compare the original passage to the student’s own words; if the similarity is too great, the blinking cursor invites a better paraphrase.

6. Beginning an outline or draft from a blank screen is intimidating. Organizing from note cards is often like painting a forest, one leaf at a time, and never finding the trees. If students keep a list of main ideas while researching, interact with the material they are reading by connecting notes with keywords, and turn that list into an outline made up of sentences, the paper would be organized and topic sentences would be already written before they even begin a draft. Outlines created from note cards rather than the main ideas researched often result in reporting information from each separate source rather than showing an understanding of the topic. The Tutorial explains and demonstrates how to create an outline from the ideas of the paper, not the individual note cards. No blank screen, no writer’s block, no panic—instead the difficult part of the draft is written before students even begin to write the draft.

7. MLA, APA, Chicago Style…Students don’t understand it is important to format documentation accurately. To students, the content they find in their research is more important than the seemingly arbitrary format of citing the source. Usually the citations and bibliography are done last, if at all. Students may be excited about the fact that they finished the paper, that they learned something interesting, that they experienced the serendipity of learning something new. The significance of putting the last name first or placing a comma or period in the right place in a citation is lost. In reality, students should focus on the content rather than the form. PaperToolsPro™ creates the form for them—the citation and bibliography entries in the correct format—so that they can concentrate on the content.